The Dearly Departed Return to Russia

A recent propaganda film called “President,” a two-and-a-half-hour review of the victories Putin has won for Russia, included the exhumation and reburial, in 2005, of White Guard general Anton Denikin, whose new grave is seen here.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXEI NIKOLSK / RIA-NOVOSTI VIA AP

Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, wants to exhume the remains of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, which have rested for over seventy years at Kensico cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, and re-inter them in Russia. “The greatest of the Russian geniuses, Sergei Rachmaninoff, has been portrayed in an utterly wrong way in the West recently,” said the minister. “Americans have the gall to privatize Rachmaninoff’s name,” he said, explaining that the composer, who left Russia in 1917, at the age of forty-four, is considered by Americans to be an American.

In the last quarter century, Russia has repeatedly attempted to reclaim the ashes of its émigrés and bring them home, after they have been silent for decades. On a few occasions, it has succeeded—and these successes have been loudly celebrated in Russia as victories in the battleground of history. In this way the reburials are not unlike President Putin’s repeated diving expeditions for ancient amphorae: they are staged ceremonial events intended to show that Russia owns its own history, and all the Russians in it. A recent propaganda film called “President,” a two-and-a-half-hour review of the victories Putin has won for Russia, included the exhumation and reburial, in 2005, of White Guard general Anton Denikin, (who died in Ann Arbor in 1947), nationalist philosopher Ivan Ilyin (who was exiled from Russia on Lenin’s orders in 1922, and died in Switzerland in 1954), and their wives. Putin himself laid flowers at their new Moscow graves for the cameras. For the propaganda movie, the country’s most successful film director, Nikita Mikhalkov, explained that the reburials were the “real end of the civil war” that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia’s latest version of history doesn’t actually aim to end that civil war – it attempts to obliterate it. The new story is seamless, from Peter the Great to Joseph Stalin to Vladimir Putin, a succession of great leaders with nary a revolution nor an abdication between them. This was why the grandson of another White Guard leader, General Pyotr Wrangel, declined to allow his grandfather’s remains to be transferred to Moscow from Belgrade, where they have rested since 1928. “He believed that Bolshevism is absolute evil,” wrote the grandson, Peter Basilevsky, in 2007. “Many changes have occurred in the last twenty years . . . But one thing has not happened: the state has not yet condemned the evil.” This was one family that had not forgiven and forgotten—so the Kremlin backed off its plans to exhume General Wrangel. The exhumation craze began even before the Soviet Union collapsed. Back in 1984, the bass Feodor Chaliapin was dug up in Paris, where he had died in 1938, to be re-interred in Moscow. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, then a recent exile in Paris himself, wrote an article for a Russian-language émigré paper, blasting the Soviet Union for seeking to leech legitimacy from long-cold corpses. Rostropovich spent the last thirty years of his life in the West, primarily in Paris, but died in Moscow in 2007. He now lies in the same cemetery as Chaliapin. Moving ashes around is not the only way Russia has been capitalizing on its dead classics, heroes, and generals. In November, 2013, the Kremlin hosted a bizarre gathering of the descendants of poets and writers including Tolstoy and Pushkin. In February, 2014, it paraded the virtual images of its cultural icons—including Vladimir Nabokov, who lived and died in exile—during the dream-sequence opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics. Most inventively, Russian media have been publishing interviews from beyond the grave. In June, the nineteenth-century poet Mikhail Lermontov spoke out in favor of the Russian war effort in Ukraine. In April, the pro-government newspaper Kulturapublished an interview with the nineteenth-century composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in which he re-asserted his love of Russia and denounced his love of men.* “I am sometimes overcome by the crazy desire to be loved by a woman’s touch,” the late no-longer-gay composer said, in conclusion of his imaginary interview. The smartest of the great Russians know to take precautions against being co-opted by the Kremlin after death. When the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya died in Germany, in May, official Moscow shifted into high ceremonial gear, but then Plisetskaya’s widower, the composer Rodion Shchedrin, released his and Plisetskaya’s joint will. It turned out to preclude any burial ceremony, now or later: “Our bodies shall be burned after death, and when there comes the sad hour of passing of that one of us who lived longer, or in the event that we die at the same time, both our ashes shall be mixed together and scattered over Russia.” The will further prohibited any public event connected with Plisetskaya’s death, so the hastily announced plans were scrapped. That may not, however, protect the great ballet dancer from being interviewed by some Russian newspaper down the road.

*This sentence has been revised to clarify the relationship between the Russian government and the newspaper Kultura.